This was another wonderful year for my 20 seniors. As a cohort they received over $4,000,000 in merit aid offers which is the highest amount yet for Annapolis College Consulting. One student received a full ride scholarship valued at $232,000, and two different students received over $700,000 in merit aid offers. On a per college basis, these students received an average of $61,000 from the colleges which offered merit aid. The colleges that they applied to were quite diverse, from University of Alaska to NYU, University of Southern California to Cornell, University of Santa Cruz (whose mascot is the banana slug) to Notre Dame, University of Chicago to Eckerd. Happily, every senior who applied to University of Maryland was accepted, which keeps my long running track record for this institution. The majority of students got into their first-choice college, and many received acceptances to every college that they applied to.

General trends that I saw this year are that many more colleges asked students for school specific essays, and that small liberal arts colleges offered larger merit aid awards. Many students who applied to private institutions received over $100,000 in awards from these colleges. This shows me that private colleges are aggressively trying to attract more qualified students. Most public universities sharply decreased awards of merit aid, probably due to funding issues and increased applications.

Every year gaining admission to well known “brand name” colleges becomes more difficult as students vie to outdo each other in many arenas. The reassuring news is that Annapolis College Consulting students were accepted into these colleges while seniors with similar statistics were denied. For Ivy League schools, this year’s admissions cycle had the lowest acceptance rates in history at almost all universities. These colleges also changed their institutional admissions priorities and accepted more first-generation college students as well as increased their demographic diversity.

These are the 91 different colleges that students were accepted to this year: